Here’s a pretty distraction: a time-lapse video of Comet Lovejoy taken over South America’s Andes Mountains. As Kottke points out, it’s definitely worth watching through the last sequence.
***
“When the rallies happened in Tahrir Square,” wrote an Egyptian army officer in his personal journal, recently written about by The Guardian, “we would all receive a large bonus.”
***
Forget the Laundromat: these clothes need only sunshine to get clean.
***
Mario Kart can save your life.
***
We’ve been hearing a lot about the pointlessness of the Iowa caucus and its unsophisticated voters. One Iowa native blasts back. (Available in clean or saucy versions.)
***
Why are movie theaters losing their charm? Roger Ebert posits a few of their problems. Price is one issue, of which he says: “No matter what your opinion is about 3D, the charm of paying a hefty surcharge has worn off for the hypothetical family of four.”
***
A brief consideration of the meteoric rise of queer studies.
***
“When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago,” writes Nicholas Carr, “he also gave us immovable text.” According to him, e-books make literature both editable and collaborative–what amounts to the most drastic change to the book in centuries–for better or worse.
***
There is something intrinsically different between people who know one or a handful of languages and those that know eleven. Have you ever met a hyperpolyglot?
***
How a 1930s photographer turned writers into literary celebrities.
***
More red tape: As of the first of the year, New Hampshire girls under age 18 have to notify a parent or guardian at least 48 hours before they have an abortion.
***
Bellingham Review‘s first online issue is now available.
***
Newt Gingrich’s mission is no longer seeking the Republican presidential nomination; it’s destroying Mitt Romney.